Former Mets hitting coach Chili Davis was fired back in May after a slow start for New York and its hitters, most notably Francisco Lindor, but the change in the dugout didn’t seem to fix much on the field.
The Mets did hold onto first place for much of the first half of the season, but fell apart in the second half, and finished 27th in all of baseball in runs scored. The switch to Hugh Quattlebaum and Kevin Howard wasn’t enough to get Lindor back to star form, or to awaken Michael Conforto from his prolonged slump, and New York fell into another sub-.500 season.
Now, officially free of his contract, Davis is speaking out on his firing and his former employer, an organization Davis believes it too reliant on a misguided us of analytics.
Davis, talking with the New York Post, cited general manager Zack Scott as too reliant on an unreliable approach, preaching process over results when announcing the departure of Davis.
“Well, if the process doesn’t produce positive or good results, then the process is worthless, because it’s not a good process,” Davis said. “The process is making your players better. It’s a bullcrap statement to tell me it’s not about the results, it’s about the process.
“How did the process work out? That’s my question. How well did the process work? It’s not about the results, so how did the process work, because everybody could see the results.”
Davis said he believes in the benefit of analytics, but doesn’t believe the Mets used them properly, citing a specific example of an April matchup with the Cubs, where he was told to instruct his hitters to prepare for a heavy dose of changeups from Jake Arrieta, who the Mets told Davis had been heavy on his changeups through a three-start span, which Davis thought was a small sample that didn’t take matchups into account. Arrieta went on to throw half of the amount of changeups against the Mets.
“I look at analytics as information,” Davis said. “It could be good information, but am I going to coach solely with analytics? No. Because numbers and computers and machines have a place, but when you are dealing with human beings and you are a hitting coach or pitching coach or any kind of coach, you have to deal with personalities, you have to deal with emotions sometimes. You have to deal with some guys’ psyche. I am saying that as a former player.”
Davis wasn’t surprised many Mets hitters didn’t turn their seasons around despite a changing of the guard in the coaching staff, and thought his replacements were put in an impossible situation.
“They trusted us and we communicated with them well, and I think throughout the year we would have managed to get them on track, doing what they do,” Davis said. “And I think it was somewhat unfair to the Quattlebaum-Howard duo, to bring them in when they did, because they didn’t know anything about the players. It was just a bad decision.”
Scott, no longer with the team as he awaits his trial for a DUI, believed change was necessary, and Davis agrees. Just not the change that was made in May.
He believes something much greater is necessary, which has already seemed to be started with an overhaul of the coaching staff.
“That organization needs a big turnaround, they need to clean house,” Davis said. “Some of the people that have been there so long during those dismal years, they need to bring some fresh faces and baseball people in there.”
Follow Ryan Chichester on Twitter: @ryanchichester1
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